Traditionally, physical retail items were sold at the retail level in so-called “bricks-and-mortar” stores. The term “bricks-and-mortar” means that the store is a physical place where there are physical products available for customers to purchase and take out of the store, as opposed to a virtual store that a customer cannot physically frequent. Increasingly today, however, products are sold by so-called “on-line retailers”. Typically, a customer of an on-line retailer uses a computer browser to go to an internet web-site maintained by the on-line retailer and uses the web-site to order and pay for a product in an on-line transaction. The purchased product must then be shipped to the customer, so the customer at the time of ordering elects a mode of shipment and pays for the product to be shipped to the customer. As compared to a traditional transaction at a bricks-and-mortar store, the customer typically incurs the added cost of inefficient point-to-point shipment. There is also a substantial delay between the time of purchase and the time when the product eventually arrives in delivered form to the customer. Nonetheless, for various reasons, on-line retailers often take market share from many bricks-and-mortar retailers. Techniques and methods are sought whereby owners of bricks-and-mortar stores can recapture some of this lost market share.